Having reflected on the various elements of the first sentence of our diocesan and parish mission statement, the following sentence is added to sum up the mission:

Accordingly, the community of Catholic faithful in this Diocese is committed to the discipleship and stewardship way of life as commanded by Christ Our Savior and as revealed by Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

What catches my attention in this sentence is the use of the phrase “way of life.”  Discipleship and stewardship is not meant to be a program or an initiative with a beginning and an ending.  Rather, it is intended to be a way of life that guides us in all of our thoughts, words, and actions.  Being a disciple and a steward is not something just for Mass on Sunday, but our entire lives are meant to be ordered to following Jesus and living according to His teachings, those revealed in both Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

It is important to come back to a fundamental point as it relates to our Catholic faith, namely that being a disciple is not first and foremost about observing rules.  Rather, Christianity is about being in relationship with a person, Jesus Christ.  We can see this in the account of the call of the Twelve as recounted in the Gospel of Mark:

He went up the mountain and summoned those whom He wanted and they came to Him. He appointed twelve [whom He also named apostles] that they might be with Him and He might send them forth to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. (Mk 3:13-15)

Before sending them out, Jesus called the Apostles to “be with Him.”  This indicates the desire that Jesus has to first be a friend with us by our spending time with Him, especially in prayer, worship, and learning about Him.  From that closeness with Him, we come to know Him and love Him, as we discover just how much He loves us.  Then, from that place of friendship and awareness of that depth of His love, we willingly and joyfully go out, letting our lives be lived in union with Him and according to His will in everything.

There is a quote that I often think about when considering the call to make following Jesus more than just an occasional activity, but truly a way of life.  It is often attributed to the former Superior General of the Jesuits, Fathe Pedro Arrupe, SJ.  Perhaps I have used this quote before, but it is worth sharing again, as it speaks so beautifully about the call to make discipleship and stewardship a way of life:

Nothing is more practical than finding God, 
than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, 
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: September 15^th 

3 times he had already gone back to Italy. This time it was for good. The year was 1907, and Fr. Paulo Manna, a 35-year-old would-be missionary, was returning to his home country ill, a “failed missionary” as he called himself, to Burma (now called Myanmar). It had looked so hopeful. He had entered the Institute for the Foreign Missions at the age of 19, was ordained a priest at 22, and by 25 arrived as a missionary in the Eastern Burma territory of Toungoo, meeting his beloved Ghekkú tribe for the first time. 

A perusal of pictures from the Institute sketches the scene: a smiling, grizzled, priest clad in white is surrounded by the local children, grinning from ear to ear, everyone standing in front of a new school, or an ambulance, or collected in a makeshift choir. Now Fr. Paulo was leaving that all behind because of tuberculosis. He didn’t make the cut as a missionary. One year later, in 1908, he went on pilgrimage to Lourdes. He did not go asking for a physical healing, nor even for clarity on what to do next, he just asked for greater personal holiness and purity, and eternal salvation for himself and everyone he loved. Kneeling at Our Lady’s shrine, he surrendered the failure into God’s hands.

What was God intending for him? Where was this zeal for carrying the Gospel to the ends of the earth supposed to carry him if not to the ends of the earth? He looked at what was already happening in the Church for the work of the missions. Three different major organizations were already founded: the Propaganda Fidei, which begun by the lay woman, Pauline Jaricot, in 1815, its first big initiative being a worldwide collection to support the Church in Louisiana (this being just a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, that second diocese of the United States was an overwhelming territory for Bp. Louis Dubourg to care for). There was also already the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, founded in 1889 by another lawwoman, Stephanie to support the training of local clergy in mission territory. And, lastly, there was the Association of the Holy Childhood, which collected alms from children in Christian lands to support their peers growing up in poverty throughout the world.

So you had organizations fundraising for missionary lands, training foreign priests, and caring for impoverished children. What remained? Years later this is how Paulo Manna described the breakthrough: 

We missionaries often wonder why the work of the conversion of the non-Christian world goes so slowly. We usually give various reasons to explain this painful fact, and in truth the problem may be considered from many angles, some of which do not concern our responsibility. But for the part that does concern us, and it is the main part, the problem has a very clear solution. To save the world, God in his infinite wisdom wanted to have co-workers. God does his part well: do the people called to help him do their part equally well? … The missionary problem has been, and still is almost ignored by the Christian people. Those who were interested in the past were always a minority, and it is extremely painful to see today too, although some progress has been made, how the enormous question is far from being understood and faced fully by clergy and people.

The world will not be converted by one great missionary, nor an organization that trains priests or funds schools, or builds hospitals. All that is splendid, and necessary, but the breakthrough that was needed was to make every Catholic in the world a missionary. To remind the Church, every single member of the Church, that they were also called to be missionaries in their own backyard. 

And so he began the fourth and final of the great Pontifical Mission Societies of the Church. Its work would be to cultivate in all priests, and laypeople, a sense of the missionary work of the Church, and the call to mission that was given to them. Three years later, in 1919, Pope Benedict XV penned an apostolic letter to the world dismembered by World War I, choosing as his theme Christ’s mandate to “proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” Vatican II would also take up Manna’s insight, that every Christian is called to be a missionary in their own part of the world. What was the only pre-requisite to be a missionary? Vatican II would call it the “universal call to holiness”, but Manna described it decades before:

… neither brilliance nor prudence, nor courage have made [the great missionaries] great in our eyes and the eyes of God. They have been great, they have saved many souls, they have founded Churches, mainly because they were holy men, that is, spiritual men. This is the secret, the soul of their zeal, their perseverance and their success; this is the solemn teaching they have handed down to us and which I love to remind you of, so that our missionaries of today and those of tomorrow may always build upon it the first and essential reason for their own sanctification and the sanctification of the souls that are, and will be entrusted to them.

– Fr. Dominic often likes to engage those big questions: How to share the Gospel? How to save our country? How to make an impact? How to bring peace to our world? Bl. Manna tells us that all of those are answered by a simpler question: “What today is getting in the way of my holiness?” 

The final phrase of the first sentence of our diocesan and parish mission statement is likely the most important in the entire statement.  After committing ourselves to being “dedicated missionary disciples of the Risen Lord” and “steadfast stewards of God’s creation”, we express that we are a people “who seek to become saints.”

When considering this call to become a saint, I am reminded of a famous quote by the French Catholic author, Leon Bloy, who wrote: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”  I do not know about you, but when I read that quote I am both encouraged and discouraged.  First of all, I am encouraged by reading this, as it kindles something that is within each and every one of us, that desire to be holy, to be close to God, to one day be among His elect in Heaven.  This desire was planted in our hearts on the day of our Baptism, and that desire is always at work in us.

At the same time, I cannot help feeling somewhat discouraged.  If you are like me, then there is the glaring reality that I am far from becoming a saint, at least as I consider who the saints are.  When we think of the saints, we think of the many saintly examples that the Church provides for us, sort of the Hall of Fame of Sanctity.  We look at figures like St. Paul, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Maximilan Kolbe, St. Teresa of Kolkata, just to name a few.  In them, we see heroic examples of courage, we see dedication to the poorest of the poor, we see holy souls who lived totally united to God.  Then, when we look at ourselves, we realize that we usually do not measure up, and we experience that discouragement.

About ten years ago, I had a chance encounter with a fairly new Catholic musician named Danielle Rose.  I looked up her music and was struck in particular with a song that she wrote, titled The Saint that is Just Me.  The song begins like this:

O I thought I’d be heroic and inspiring.
I wanted to offer you the greatest sacrifice.
Like all the saints who’d gone before me,
I tried to prove my love for you, and so to gain the prize.

After singing about how she tried to imitate a variety of saints, she sings these words that speak hope into that feeling of discouragement:

When you hung upon the cross looking at me,
You didn’t die so I would try to be somebody else.
You died so I could be the saint that is just me.

This is the saint that the Lord is calling us to be – not another St. Francis or St. Clare, not another St. Therese of St. John Paul II.  He is calling you and me to be “the saint that is just me.”  This means that whatever our circumstances may be in our lives, God is calling us to be a saint through our fidelity to where He has called us.  He will never deprive us of all of the graces we need, for He desires that “all be saved” (1 Tm 2:4), which means that He desires all to become saints.

Therefore, as we proclaim that the ultimate goal of our mission as a diocese, as a parish, and as individuals is to become saints, let us be filled with hope and joy, never falling into discouragement, thinking the road to holiness impossible, even when faced with our weaknesses.  Let us be encouraged by Jesus’s response to St. Peter when he asked the Lord about who could be saved.  Jesus said: “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” (Mt 19:26)

Father Alford     

Feast Day: September 8^th 

It was winter, in Trier Germany, in 1148, and Bernard of Clairvaux had brought to Pope Eugenius III a fascinating document that had been anxiously sent to him the prior year by a middle aged nun 60 miles East of them, at the Benedictine Monastery of Disibodenberg. It was a vivid, profound, iridescent presentation of the Christian vision of the world. Orthodox, but unique. Traditional – in the way it drew in the lines of thought from the great teachers of the faith down through the centuries – yet creative, and balanced, and beautiful. The nun had received little education, but had experienced an illumination of her mind by the grace of God and, after keeping the visions to herself for decades, but had now decided to begin writing them down and wanted to ask for the blessing of the Holy Father. 

To give you a greater glimpse of the mind of this woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen, I offer an image she wrote herself – of her own place in God’s work – to Pope Eugenius III after his encouragement of her continued writing and teaching: 

Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I ‘”A feather on the breath of God.”

But she was also a poet and hymnist. Consider just one  line from her hymn praising the Blessed Virgin, Ave, Generosa (and this is a translation! It is simple, yet lovely; sublime, and captivating!): 

Thus your womb held joy,
when harmony of all Heaven
chimed out from you,
because, Virgin, you carried Christ
whence your chastity blazed in God.
Your flesh has known delight,
like the grassland touched by dew
and immersed in its freshness:
so it was with you,
o mother of all joy

She was also an artist, drawing images so that other people could picture something of what she saw in her mind under God’s inspiration. See here a self-portrait of sorts, included in her most famous theological work, the Scivias (it was the first part of this work that had been sent to Pope Eugenius III by means of Bernard of Clairvaux), in which she tries to depict her experience of receiving these insights from God (depicted with tongues of fire, though her eyes are still able to see, and her hand to write them down). (This image is from the original Wiesbaden Codex which was made at the end of Hildegard’s life, which was actually lost in 1945 at the end of WWII, then discovered to have been confiscated by the Soviets, who were then tricked out of it when some scholars swapped it for a similar looking book … I kid you not!) 

But Hildegard was not just visionary, and composer, and preacher, and iconographer, and mother superior of that community at Disibodenberg, and Doctor of the Church, AND someone who seriously called out the political leaders of her day both secular and religious (she once wrote to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who was meddling again in the election of a pope, “I see you like a little boy or some madman living before the Living Eyes.”)!!

All of this is amazing, but on top of this, she was also the first person in the world to fully articulate the Christian understanding of the full sexual complementarity of men and women. That men and women have equal dignity AND meaningful differences, and we can hold onto both truths (the world long struggled with the first truth, and in our day struggles with the second one. Hildegard nails both, and exemplifies both in her own uniquely feminine, but undoubtably gutsy, life). 

What has all this to do with St. Disibod?? He lived 500 years before Hildegard, had a miserable go at trying to a bishop in Ireland, so he traveled to Germany and built a little monastery near Bingen, at the confluence of the Nahe and Glan rivers. That little hermitage, which grew into a monastery during his life, some centuries later would be a bustling monastic powerhouse, with orders of men and women there. And there a little girl, having extraordinary visions, would enter the convent as a teenager, and grow up to change (and challenge) the way the world saw women a thousand years after. 

Such is the impact of a failed missionary who was faithful to the prodding of the Holy Spirit to try instead to start a monastery.

– Fr. Dominic is often discouraged when some project that seems important falls apart, or when the project at hand today doesn’t look promising. St. Disibod couldn’t understand his failure in Ireland wither, or why God was sending him to start a monastery in Germany. His job, and ours, is to just keep following the Lord anyway.

Returning to our unpacking of our diocesan and parish mission statement, the next phrase to consider is where we express our desire, as missionary disciples, to be “steadfast stewards of God’s creation.”  

In the early 1990’s, the Bishops of the United States issued a Pastoral Letter on Stewardship, Stewardship: A Disciple’s Response.  In that document, they reflected on the image of stewardship by citing the Parable of the Talent in Matthew 24:14-30.  The story is about a man going on a journey who “called his servants and entrusted to them his property.” (Mt 25:14)  He gave each of them a different number of talents.  Upon his return, he commended those servants who used the talents entrusted to them, and he punished the one who did nothing.  Here is an important point the document makes on this parable:

The silver pieces of this story stand for a great deal besides money. All temporal and spiritual goods are created by and come from God. That is true of everything human beings have: spiritual gifts like faith, hope, and love; talents of body and brain; cherished relationships with family and friends; material goods; the achievements of human genius and skill; the world itself. One day God will require an accounting of the use each person has made of the particular portion of these goods entrusted to him or her. (p. 20)

The first thing that a steward needs to acknowledge is the primacy of God for everything.  All that we have is a gift that has been entrusted to us by God, and He is asking us to be good stewards of those gifts.  As Christians, that stewardship is expressed in generously sharing our gifts with others, not just clinging to them selfishly as though they were our exclusive property.

Perhaps one of the most valuable, and seemingly scarce, gifts is our time.  We are pulled in so many different directions that when we are asked to consider giving an extra hour or so, we are hesitant to do so.  In fact, we would just as soon give an extra $20 to a cause than take an hour of our valuable time to volunteer for that same cause.  We often conclude that our time is more valuable, and that somebody else will step up to fill the need.  We sadly are aware of the fact that when this dynamic exists, a small number of people are left to do the majority of the work, resulting in their getting burned out more quickly, when had everybody been willing to be generous with a little bit of their time, the burden would have been more equally distributed.

Speaking of our stewardship of time, the Church asks us for an hour each week to set aside to worship Him at Sunday Mass.  If we acknowledge that all the time that we have comes from Him, how can we possibly not want to give Him that hour of thanksgiving and prayer each Sunday?  If we commit to this most fundamental form of stewardship, we will be well on our way to being open to being good stewards of all of the others gifts with which the Lord has blessed us, and be ever more willing to share them generously for the good of others.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: September 1^st 

Anybody know the name Bill Penfield? How about David Werder? Both these fine gentlemen, Bill in the 1930s, and David in the 1980s, have the distinction of setting endurance records in the practice of pole sitting. I suspect that name tells you most of what you need to know, but for everyone’s greater knowledge, pole-sitting is the attempt to sit on top of a tall pole for as long as possible to set a record (sometimes also to make a point). Bill sat on a pole in Strawberry Point, Iowa for 51 days in 1930, only coming down when a thunderstorm threatened his life. (Happily, though his effort was curtailed, he did manage to take the crown from the real pioneer of pole-sitting of that era, Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, who had recently defended his own title with a 49-day sit in 1929.)

But those guys have nothing on David Werder, who in November, 1982 climbed up a pole at an appliance center in Clearwater, Washington – he was appalled by the cost of gasoline which had reached 99 cents a gallon – and proceeded to remain on top of that pole for 439 days, 11 hours, and 6 minutes. This meant he spent the entirety of 1983 on top of said pole, though, sad to say, my research indicates that gas only dropped a few cents during that time. I guess he saved plenty of pennies by not driving that whole time…

But neither Bill, or David, can hold a candle to St. Simeon Stylite. That title, “stylite”, actually means he was a pole-sitter of the saintly sort – there was a handful of hermits who endured life on top of pillars for periods of time in the age of the desert fathers, earning for themselves that surname. But Simeon took it to another level. Born in 390, a generation or two after Constantine legalized Christianity around the empire (with worship of Christ quickly becoming the official religion of the empire and gaining huge swaths of the population to the fold), he grew up in the kingdom of Cilicia, in modern day Turkey, and was a shepherd. Around the age of 13 he was listening to (or perhaps reading) the Beatitudes, and was struck to the heart by Our Lord’s words. He left behind his family and occupation and joined a monastery. 

Now, we must take a moment to recall that monasteries, in large part, were an attempt to find a way to carry forward the courage and heroism of the martyrs into an age when few places anymore were out to kill Christians. In the early Church, martyrs were considered Christians par excellence, and the stories of their sacrifice and faithfulness, alongside of the Church’s unprecedented concern for the poor and sick and unimportant, was the primary catalyst for all of those conversions to Christ. The hermits and early monks carried the battle that was waged in the arenas and amphitheaters of the empire into their own hearts and minds as they left behind every earthly comfort and followed Christ in the desert. They would endure not the beasts of the coliseum but the relentless temptations of the Evil One. 

Before we even get back to Simeon, it’s helpful to recognize what is happening here. These monks left behind the distractions and cares and comforts of the world, and this means they could reach extraordinary depths of prayer and asceticism BUT it also entailed directly engaging the battle for Christ in their mind. 

Jesus never said anything about sitting on pillars, but the first words He proclaimed to the world were “repent and believe in the Gospel.” We all love the Gospel I think, but are we willing to do the prerequisite act of repenting? That command, “repent”, literally means “change your mind” [metanoeite], and in their totality. To listen to no voices except the Lord’s, to accept no truth except His, to give no space to any other authority. The rest of the New Testament is relentless on this point: Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  Ephesians: 4:22-24: “Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” Philippians 2:5: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.”

St. Simon Stylite spent 37 years on his pillar, seeking not acclaim, but solitude; not desiring any earthly accomplishment but precisely to drive from his mind every voice that was not that of Christ. May he intercede for us that we would know how to similarly engage that battle for ourselves!

– Fr. Dominic does not have a pillar to spend his days upon … but he spends a lot of time in the car and would probably have more the mind of Christ if he left some of those hours empty, expecting the Lord to do great things rather than filling them with noise (or complaining about them).

The longest continuous responsibility that I have had as a priest is serving our diocese as the Director of the Office for Vocations.  In fact, all but two of my thirteen years as a priest has had me involved in vocations ministry.  Over those eleven years, it has been my experience that there are few other causes that people in our diocese are united around than praying for vocations.  We all know how much priests are needed for the continued sacramental life of our parishes, so praying for men to consider a call to the priesthood is a pretty easy ask.  In particular, the people of our diocese love praying for our seminarians, those men who have discerned that God might be calling them to the priesthood, and who have taken a step in faith to enter the seminary.  Our seminarians share regularly how supported they feel because of the prayers and other forms of encouragement offered by the good people of our diocese.  

Regarding seminarians, there are few things that make a parish prouder than when one of their own enters into the seminary.  Here at the Cathedral, we are actually blessed to have two of our current crop of seminarians who call our parish home.  First of all, we have Joseph Tuttle, a name that many of you probably do not recognize.  Joseph is actually originally from Rockford, but he happens to be Father Dominic Rankin’s cousin!  When he discerned the possibility of joining our diocese, we wanted to give him a parish with which to be affiliated, and with Father Rankin living here at the Cathedral, it makes sense for him to call this home.  You may see Joseph around during some of the breaks from St. Meinrad Seminary in Southern Indiana, where he attends.  He has been assigned at different parishes in the diocese the past two summers to get him some more exposure to the diocese.  He is beginning his third year of formation, and God-willing, will be ordained a priest in 2028.

Our other seminarian is Steven Kehoe, a name that might sound a little more familiar if you pay close attention to our bulletin.  For the past several months, Steven has served as our bookkeeper.  He has also been doing a variety of custodial duties as well.  Steven spent several months in a religious order and after leaving, began discerning a call to the priesthood.  Knowing that entering seminary would still be several months off, he was looking for a job and his skills fit our needs perfectly!  Steven would begin just about every day here by attending the 7 am Mass, usually with his parents, Janet and Steve.  When the workday was over, he would usually head back to the church to pray, and then would return home a little before 6 pm, usually with his younger sister, Rose, who usually attends the 5:15 pm Mass.  Although we are happy for Steven that he is beginning seminary formation, he will be missed here in the office, as he made a big impact on the staff in the short time he was with us.  Steven is just beginning seminary, though he already has a college degree.  He is looking at about six years of formation, so God-willing, he would be ordained a priest in 2030.  He is also attending St. Meinrad Seminary.

So, I invite you to continue to pray for all of our seminarians, and especially for Joseph and Steven.  As the Cathedral parish, we have a lot to be proud of already, being the Mother Church of the diocese, and our (healthy) pride is multiplied with these two men from our parish, preparing, God-willing, to be priests one day.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: August 18^th 

This week, having ran up the word count and not finished the story last time, we return to the young priest, Fr. Alberto Hurtado, as he began his ministry to the young and poor in Santiago Chile in the 1930s. It is important to note that he didn’t try to do all the Lord had put on his heart alone. He could have just ran back and forth from class, to the streets, to spiritual direction, and crash into bed having emptied himself in all of it. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not how Jesus did the Father’s will. Jesus called others around him, into friendship with Him, and from there into the mission given to Him by God the Father. So also the first disciples, sent out two by two, and by most saints since. And so also, Padre Hurtado who in the late 1930s began to collect his pupils around him.

Some he went deep, offering spiritual direction and directing retreats for groups of the boys. As it was for Alberto in his younger days, so also for these men it was a profound gift. They learned to pray, to discern, to strive for heroic sanctity. Some would go on to be priests, others good Christian fathers and leaders in their communities. The seeds planted by a priest willing to really befriend them would impact the world for the better for decades to come. But Padre Hurtado didn’t just engage them one-by-one or in small groups, he also enlisted whole cohorts of them into another Sodality of Our Lady. He taught them the catechism, and taught them how to teach the catechism to those stuck on the streets. So it was that his two loves – for the poor, and the young – was combined and multiplied as all of them grew in wisdom and grace. 

And those studies and intelligence that he had been given he was about to unleash in a much bigger way in his pursuit to love the least brothers and sisters of Christ. In 1936, he wrote “The Priesthood Crisis in Chile”, depicting starkly the many little (and poor) towns who had no priest to bring them the sacraments. He also pointed to the dismal lack of formation for catechists, with many men enlisting to teach the faith but few of them receiving the formation they would need for that (much less to discern becoming a priest). For the leaders of the country (and the Church, the political party having a strong sway over the Church hierarchy) this was an unwelcome message. These were problems in the little places far from the important, prosperous, and politically impactful cities. 

And Hurtado wasn’t done. In 1941, he published “Is Chile a Catholic Country?” For a country that was 94% Catholic, his answer – “not yet” – was shocking. But he pointed to the poor on every street and asked the provocative question: If people are starving, hurting, and abandoned, can we really say we are Christian? Or, similarly, if only 9% of women, and 3.5% of men, regularly attend Mass and receive Holy Communion, was Chile really Catholic? 

In 1946 his most famous message was sent: he bought a green pickup truck. The backstory was that a year or two earlier he had encountered one of his beggars on a cold night, shivering on the streets, with no where to find shelter. A few days later he was leading a retreat for women when he spontaneously began talking about that man: 

Christ roams through our streets in the person of so many of the suffering poor, sick and dispossessed, and people thrown out of their miserable slums; Christ huddled under bridges, in the person of so many children who lack someone to call father, who have been deprived for many years without a mother’s kiss on their foreheads . . . Christ is without a home! Shouldn’t we want to give him one, those of us who have the joy of a comfortable home, plenty of good food, the means to educate and assure the future of our children? “What you do to the least of me, you do to me,” Jesus said.

Soon after, with those women’s generosity, the first Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ) was begun. It was modeled after Fr. Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska, though over time he would open ones for children, then women, and then men. Some were trade schools, some rehabilitation centers, all of them offering shelter and food, but the deeper nourishment of mind and soul as well. Over the next 6 years 850,000 children alone received help as the homes opened across the country. 

As for the truck, as he drove it around picking up the suffering and impoverished, it became an emblem of this crazy wonderful priest, and the crazy wonderful life that Christ means to bring to everyone through His Church. 

In 1952 he was stricken with intense pain and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In every newspaper and in broadcast media the entire country watched his decline. Throughout it all, having been faithful to the Lord in so many ways, the priest only said “I am content Lord.”

– Fr. Dominic is inspired this week to risk bigger things for Jesus. What could happen if we all simply did God’s will each day? What would happen if we lived our lives like a saint? What if our vehicle was known across the country as an emblem of Christ? 

The universal call to missionary discipleship, as I mentioned last week, can seem a little intimidating.  We perhaps have in our mind what a missionary might look like, or at least somebody who publicly proclaims the faith.  We think of people who teach the faith and might think: “I cannot do that.”  You might listen to a priest or deacon preach at Mass and think: “I could never do that.”  But those are only a few expressions of missionary discipleship.

I recently heard Dr. Edward Sri, a well-known Catholic speaker and teacher, use an analogy that I find helpful in this regard.  He described the experience of having seen a good movie.  When we go to our friends, we are eager to share our experience with them.  We are not film critics or experts in cinematography, but that does not prevent us from sharing what we liked about the movie, inviting our friends to go see that movie as well.  The same is true with sharing our faith.  We do not need to have an advanced degree in theology to share our faith.  Pope Francis makes this point in the quote that I shared last week.  The pertinent line is as follows: “indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love.” (Evangelii Gaudium, 120)

Before proposing some practical ideas on how to be a missionary disciple, I want to suggest a possible reason why we might be hesitant to share the faith.  I think we can find the reason in the very next line from the Holy Father in the above-mentioned quote: “Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus.”  I note the use of the phrase: “to the extent.”  One of the principal reasons why we can be hesitant to share the Gospel is because we have not let the love of God in Christ Jesus penetrate our hearts.  Sure, we know that God is love, and we will even be willing to acknowledge that God loves us.  But so many of us have hardly encountered that love in a personal and profound way, such that our lives are changed by it.  We go to Mass, we say our prayers before meals, we may even read the Bible or pray the Rosary, but that does not necessarily equate to personally encountering the love of Christ.  He can and does offer that gift to us through those means, but He will never force Himself on us.  He asks for hearts open to receiving His love and letting that love penetrate to the very core of our being.

Some of you reading this have indeed encountered that type of love from the Lord, and thanks be to God for that!  But some of you reading this may have not truly encountered that love yet.  The good news is that there is hope!  We are never too old or inexperienced to have His love surprise us in a powerful way.  Opening ourselves to encounter God’s love for us is therefore the first and fundamental step in beginning to live missionary discipleship.  Practically speaking, this means taking time each day to open ourselves to encounter that love.  We call this prayer.  We can continue to recite our normal prayers, read the Bible, and go to Mass.  But we need some time each day to come face to face with Our Lord, to be aware of His look of love upon us, and to enter into communion with Him, sharing our hearts with Him, so that we can be more open to the sharing of His heart with us, which is always taking place, just waiting to be received.  As the saying goes: “You cannot give what you do not have.”  We cannot share the Good News that Christ wants to share with others if we have not experienced and are convinced that the Good News applies to us.

So if missionary discipleship seems difficult, perhaps that is a good gauge of where you are in your personal relationship with Jesus.  Have no fear if where you are at is not where you would like to be.  Ask the Lord to open your heart more to His love for you, and that love, once received, cannot be kept to ourselves.  Like the experience of seeing a great movie, we will not be able to wait to share with others the goodness of God’s love and His desire to deepen that love with all of His children.

Father Alford     

Feast Day: August 18^th 

Alberto was only 4 years old, the year was 1905, when the news reached his mother, brother, and he that his father had died. The loss ransacked the life of the little boy. Not only was he now bereft his father, but soon the family’s home as well, and then even the stability of his mother. Alberto and his brother would spend their childhood going from one home to another, cared for as best his relatives could, but deep in his heart he didn’t really have a place, or family, to call home. 

As a young man he was given a scholarship at the Jesuit College in Santiago, San Ignacio. It was a prestigious all-boys school in the capital of Chile, some would see it as a chance for the young man to escape poverty, but Alberto was not moved to flee the sufferings of his youth. He joined the Sodality of Our Lady and began volunteering at a parish and school in one of the poorest parts of Santiago. He would help in the office and library and every Sunday afternoon would visit the poor and destitute in the slums around the Parish of Our Lady of Andacollo (the parish named after a little statue of Our Lady discovered by an indigenous Chilean near the mines of Andacollo in the mid-1500s. Feast day: December 26^th).

As Alberto continued his studies at the Law School at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile he continued to serve the poor every week while also discerning a vocation to the Jesuits. He had a deep desire for marriage, but an ever deeper yearning to care for many more than he could in a natural family. He had begun spiritual direction – a beautiful step to make when in a time of deep discernment – and received the counsel of his spiritual director to hold off on entering an order while still caring for his mother and brother. (He was at that time going to classes and trying to complete his studies in the mornings, and then work various jobs in the afternoons and evenings to provide for his family, and then giving his weekends to visit the poor and those abandoned on the streets!) So it was that this call from God, to give his life for those in need, continued to grow. His spiritual director during these years recalled about Alberto: “He was incapable of seeing pain, nor indeed any need without seeking a way to solve it.” 

Then in 1922, obligatory military service threw a curveball into everything. At this point, it is important to ask ourselves how we would have acted under similar circumstances. I know for myself that when obstacles and delays crash into my plans, or hopes, or attempts to follow the Lord, I often succumb to frustration, anger, or at least discouragement. It is tempting to throw up our hands and just give up on the bigger dreams and call of love. We don’t know how Alberto handled all of this, but his perseverance through the hindrances that would rise up later in his life tells us at least that the Lord taught him an important lesson in perseverance in charity during these tough years. 

In 1923 he earned his law degree and finally entered the Jesuit order. For some, a religious vocation means stability – think of Benedictines (who make a vow of stability to live their life in a particular monastery) or Carmelites, or Poor Clares and other cloistered orders who similarly dedicate themselves to a common life in a particular place. Jesuits are sort of the opposite of this. They commit their lives to live wherever their order, and above all wherever the Holy Father, sends them. Such was the share in Christ’s poverty that Alberto embraced again. But he also discovered in this a relentless joy that could come from no one except Jesus. “”Here you have me, finally a Jesuit,” he wrote to a close friend, “as happy and content as one can be on this earth!” 

He completed his novitiate and was then sent for two years to Cordoba, Argentina studying humanities. Then it was off to Barcelona, Spain to study philosophy and theology, though in 1931 the Jesuits were suppressed in that country and so he had to move on to Louvain, Belgium. There he completed a doctorate in pedagogy and psychology in 1935 having been ordained a priest in 1933. Again, we pause at this point to ask where the heart of the newly ordained Padre Hurtado was after 12 years of ever more advanced studies, so many travels and extraordinary experiences? Well, the first thing he did when he got back to Chile was to begin teaching religion at San Ignacio, pedagogy at the Catholic University of Santiago, and – as it turns out, most important to him – teaching catechism to the poor. He still loved the young, and the poor, more than anything.

Fr. Dominic has also had his fair share of travels and studies in his own path to the priesthood. This is both a blessing, and a challenge, and Fr. Hurtado life reminds him to think back to the “first love” that carried him into seminary. Perhaps all of us this week could recall where our heart was at 18 or 20. What were our dreams then? How had the Lord fashioned our hearts back when we were young? Have we given up on that call or just let it wither as the years have gone by or allowed life’s blessings and burdens to stretch and grow our hearts?